Butterflysoulfire kill the catwalk

24 Nov 2006 Category: Fashion, Features, Worldwide

Maria and Thoas are into fashion, but with their Berlin-based label Butterflysoulfire they certainly refuse to hop onto the usual fashion carousel. In fact, in the attempt to show their disgust of the downsides of this business they occasionally perform guerilla actions like storming the catwalk of another show. This German designer couple with punk attitude couldn’t only be bothered to attend a fashion school or learn the basics of tailoring and the business side of things, moreover they work in a spontaneous manner. Every piece they sell is handmade in their atelier, turning every custom-made stencil-printed outfit into a unique statement of their street wear collections. Five Butterflysoulfire-members (including the baby daughter of Maria and Thoas) live and work together under one roof, respectively an old factory in Eastern-Berlin where they practice the old hippie commune style: one shared cash box for all. Does this free concept really work, I wondered? I met Maria and Thoas at the Blickfang fashion fair last week to have a chat about their special approach on fashion.

Written by Verena

Beside te Nid shop, Harajuku’s Laforet was exhibiting their new A1 sub-label, featuring a clolourful variety of hooded sweaters and anoraks. In this already chilly late autumn breeze they asked passers-by to try on several A1 hoodies and be photographed. Some schoolgirls approached shyly and - after the shooting which they really seemed to enjoy a lot - left with beaming smiles.

“Butterflysoulfire” is pretty long for a brand name…? Would you mind telling me why you chose that one?

Thoas: My first name stems from a Greek myth. But once someone mentioned that there is actually a butterfly called Papilio thoas, or Thoas Swallowtail. In addition Lee “Scratch” Perry, the god of dub, made once a song called “Soulfire”. My guess was then that in this rather delicate and fragile animal there must be a burning soul within. The soulfire is something that I wish for every person to have deep inside.

Sounds beautiful. How did you two get together in the first place?

Thoas: In 2000 I started customizing my own clothes. People kept asking me about it until the Apartment store, a famous spot in Berlin-Mitte for designer clothing, asked to sell my stuff. So I just tried to make twenty customized unique prints of what I was wearing. A year later I started stencil-printing on textiles besides working at the the Kurvenstar, a club in Mitte. Then Marie and I met early January 2002. Only six weeks later we had our first fashion show at this club. Meaning all of a sudden we had to sew clothes for forty models but had no idea how to. We really started from scratch.

Maria: Our first collection was all about patchwork. We cut old clothes from the flea market to pieces and re-arranged them to something new, almost resembling a collage. The design was created through the combination of different colours and their proportion to each other. We added some statements on the clothes like ‘eat no food’, ‘Amok und Koma’.

Ah, that old claim from the Punk movement… Seems like you approach your work in a similar anarchistic way, right?

Maria: We do work spontaneously and also there was never a second thought about being commercially productive. Regarding our fashion shows we start only three weeks in advance, the choreography is set up three days before. We are no fashion people anyways. I actually studied stage design at art school in Berlin, so I come from the theater world originally.

You live and work altogether in one huge very old factory hall in Easter-Berlin? How does that work?

Maria: We moved in about a year ago and spend five months renovating the space. Now we are five people under one roof, including my little daughter - and that works very well.

As you told me before there is something quite special about your living situation…

Maria: Yes, we share all our income in one cash box. Meaning, if we earn something there is some money for expenses. If we don’t - there is nothing. We all get the same amount of cash.

Why did you choose that concept in the first place?

Thoas: Simply for business reasons. We couldn’t afford to hire people and pay them properly. The shop pays our rent and the food, but we never got any salary yet.

Oh, I do hope you get by somehow! Do you still produce all your clothes yourselves?

Thoas: Oh yes, like the sweater I am wearing now - that is part of our new A1 sub-label hoody line. I sewed it myself and made about 30 more for the shops. You can manufacture this only manually.

Maria: Every piece of fabric is cut out and stencil-printed manually. It would be too expensive to give it to another companies to assemble all those pieces together for a dress.

Thoas: Moreover this is like Rock’n’Roll on a sewing machine: I take the fabric pieces and just start sewing zigzag lines all over it.

Is that kind of a slight reminiscent of the DADA art movement with their Ecriture Automatique, the automatic writing that happens unconsciously?

Thoas: Kind of. Basically we are all autodidacts working in a freestyle way. We design everything for ourselves to wear as a way to show our attitude. Eventually for our next Butterflysoulfire summer collection we felt challenged to try something more advanced after our many-coloured phase. Like using silk for example.

Maria: That really nags me from time to time because the process takes so long for me. But when we work with interns like fashion students they are always quite limited in their approach. It usually takes some time until they throw overboard their conventional thinking and start working more freely.

One thing you didn’t mention so far are your Guerilla performances which made you quite famous in the Berlin fashion scene. You staged your first appearance at the fashion fair Bread&Butter in Berlin in early 2003. It was mainly because you got rather annoyed about this big new fair that kept telling that it was about promoting young designers, but charged newcomers the same booth price as established brands like Puma or Adidas. As a protest you invaded the fair with a bunch of people all wearing overalls, walking around attaching stickers directly on the clothes of the surprised visitors…

Thoas: …with slogans like “Strand unterm Asphalt” (beach underneath concrete) or “Karma police”. We took these slogans from lyrics because wile at work we love to hear all sorts of music from the likes of Iggy Pop, Coldplay, Modeselektor or T.Raumschmiere.

But as far as I remember you are also quite famous for staging another guerilla performance at the Bread&Butter 2004?

Maria: Yes, we stormed the catwalk there. A couple of days before the fair we heard about this very exclusive fashion show within the fair where only invited guests could get in. So we thought we make a statement protesting against the fashion industry and all its side effects like anorexic models, the uniformity of the business or the brand frenzy. We didn’t sleep for two days sewing overalls. Three pieces were sewed in a collage-style, three more in black with flags attached to the arms and each one had a word written on it: “Kill”, “The”, and “Catwalk”.

Thoas: As we had no invitation one of us got in by crawling through the back of a festival tent. Two more people managed their way through the kitchen. I entered with a press ticket. Eventually when the fashion show started we took off our normal clothes revealing the overalls and conquered the catwalk. We tried not to block any of the walking models and just stand there raising our arms to show the written message. The models as well as the crowd were utterly confused. This really gave me a kick. The next day we were all over the papers. Later we got an email from the Bread&Butter organization. They kind of liked our performance and also gave a hint that we should repeat the action at the next fair - which we denied of course!

The last action they staged was during the Berlin design fair Designmai. Not that they didn’t like the fair, they just wanted to separate themselves from it and created a kind of kick-off for their A1.

Thoas: On the first day we entered the fair together with 25 friends all wearing nothing but bathing suits, sunglasses, and the A1 hoody. They brought deckchairs, sat on them directly in front of the entrance and while sipping on cocktails we pretended not to notice what was going on around them.

Such a funny action. Thank you very much for showing us your lovely clothes!

12 Comments

1. You’ve got GUTS!! Good for you, keep up the good work!

   I LOVE the mini hoodies!

   Posted by: Mowgli on November 25th, 2006 at 1:09 am

2. I love it! You all are what real artists truely are made of. Your doing a great thing and inspiring many others to do something that inspires and makes a difference.

   Mandy : P

   Posted by: Mandy on November 25th, 2006 at 1:38 am

3. OMG, awesome.

   Posted by: Badger on November 25th, 2006 at 1:53 am

4. There’s something to be said for learning how to sew however.

   Posted by: Reynard on November 25th, 2006 at 4:30 pm

5. yes!!! the intervention reminds me of depeche mode anton corbijn stuff. sometimes we like BREAD and no BUTTER!

   Posted by: minako on November 28th, 2006 at 5:45 am

6. keep on rocking!

   Posted by: tommy on December 12th, 2006 at 12:21 am

7. thank you nice blog
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   Posted by: FOREX on September 24th, 2010 at 7:01 am

8. maurers

   Posted by: maurers on February 22nd, 2011 at 5:57 am

9. gel baba :)

   Posted by: goruntulu sohbet on July 23rd, 2011 at 10:32 pm

10. Your doing a great thing and inspiring many others to do something that inspires and makes a difference.

    Posted by: Cheap Ravens Jersey on August 18th, 2011 at 11:05 pm

11. Very Nice! makes me remind the coloured performance of the early pink floyd!

    Posted by: christian louboutin on November 10th, 2011 at 5:30 am

12. Butterflysoulfire kill the catwalk good post407

    Posted by: air multiplier on April 20th, 2012 at 7:38 pm

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